Wings of Fire

by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

On my return from France, after successfully testing the SLV-3 apogee motor, Dr Brahm Prakash informed me one day about the arrival of Wernher von Braun. Everybody working in rocketry knows of von Braun, who made the lethal V-2 missiles that devastated London in the Second World War. In the final stages of the War, von Braun was captured by the Allied Forces. As a tribute to his genius, von Braun was given a top position in the rocketry programme at NASA. Working for the US Army, von Braun produced the landmark Jupiter missile, which was the first IRBM with a 3000 km range. When I was asked by Dr Brahm Prakash to receive von Braun at Madras and escort him to Thumba, I was naturally excited. The V-2 missile (an abbreviation of the German word Vergeltungswaffe) was by far the greatest single achievement in the history of rockets and missiles. It was the culmination of the efforts made by von Braun and his team in the VFR (Society for Space Flight) in the 1920s. What had begun as a civilian effort soon became an official army one, and von Braun became the technical director of the German Missile Laboratory at Kummersdorf. The first V-2 missile was first tested unsuccessfully in June 1942. It toppled over on to its side and exploded. But on 16 August 1942, it became the first missile to exceed the speed of sound. Under the supervision of von Braun, more than 10,000 V-2 missiles were produced between April and October 1944 at the gigantic under-ground production unit near Nordh...